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INTERACTIVE VERSUS SELF EFFORT: UNTANGLING THE
COGNITIVE ELABORATION – LEARNING RELATIONSHIP
ON INTERNET DISCUSSION FORUMS
by
Shaosong Ou
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE MARSHALL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Shaosong Ou

Discussion forums on the Internet are becoming increasingly popular nowadays. Many have realized that these forums can create important business value by facilitating knowledge management and collaborative learning. However, successful learning does not always happen on these forums. Forum participants often experience various learning-related problems that lead to unsuccessful learning outcomes. Extant literature does not adequately address why and how learning occurs on the forums. This dissertation studies learning at the individual level on Internet discussion forums by focusing on a specific yet very important learning behavior, Cognitive Elaboration (CE).; Current CE literature generally regards Cognitive Elaboration as a highly interactive process. Most of it studies CE in a face-to-face context, an environment that only allows CEs to be interactively generated. Internet discussion forums, however, provide a very different learning platform that allows CEs to be generated both interactively and individually. This study distinguishes between two different types of CE on these forums, Interactive CE (ICE) and Self-generated CE (SCE), and argues that they interact to affect forum participant's learning experience. Data were collected from 145 discussion threads from a popular Chinese discussion forum on the Internet, using both survey and content analysis. The results provide support to the model, suggesting that the combination of both SCE and ICE creates the most favorable conditions for individual learning on Internet discussion forums.

INTERACTIVE VERSUS SELF EFFORT: UNTANGLING THE
COGNITIVE ELABORATION – LEARNING RELATIONSHIP
ON INTERNET DISCUSSION FORUMS
by
Shaosong Ou
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE MARSHALL SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Shaosong Ou